Where Can I Publish My Research Article?

Where Can I Publish My Research Article?

Submitting and publishing research articles in peer-reviewed journals can be perplexing for scholars of all levels, and junior scholars often have few resources to assist with navigating the process.

Step One: Identify potential journals in your scholarly area.

The following is a partial list of anthropologyjournal titles,organized alphabetically.

To locate titles of interest on the list, useControl+Fand type in major subfields and related disciplines.

Subdisciplines are identified using the followingkeywords:all branches, applied, archaeology, biological/physical, cultural/social, folklore, linguistic, medical, methods, paleontology, theory andvisual.If the journal spans additional disciplines, these fields are noted, such as:biology, cultural studies, education, economics, humanities, material culture, musicology, political economy, etc. If a title is heavily interdisciplinary across many of these, it is indicated as "social sciences." If the scope of a journal includes literature and the fine arts, it is indicated "humanities." If a geographic area is part of the scope of the journal and not in the title, major regions are included; some examples include:Africa, Asia, Circumpolar, Europe, Latin America, andOceania.

Step Two: Rank these potential journals for your specific article.

I suggest four considerations for creating your personal shortlist.

Scope. Evaluate the manuscript against a prospective journal's scope and article types. Click on the hyperlink or use a search engine to locate the Aims and Scope, an "About This Journal" page, and/or "Author Submission Guidelines." Any of these documents provide details about the type of desired content and submission details. To locate these documents online, you may need to type in journal name and the word "journal."

Tip:Journals may havesimilar titles so ensure that you are submitting to your desired journal.

Timing.Think about how much time you have before you need an acceptance letter. Scholars can submit a given paper to only one journal at a time. Editors have difficulty finding peer reviewers, and even more difficulty obtaining completed reviews. Time to publication may correlate with how well an editorial office is run and, if a journal is publishing late or an editor does not respond to an inquiry about average time ranges, this could be an indication that your manuscript may languish.

Tip: Journals with more frequency (more issues each year) may be faster and those with "online first" options may make your article visible sooner.

Tip: Eliminate titles that do not adhere to their publishing schedule. You can assess a journal's timeliness by checking that the online publication date of issues corresponds with the cover publication date. Additionally, email the editor and ask for the time range of their review process. Whenever possible, avoid submitting to any journal that is publishing behind schedule.

Visibility once published. If your article is a scholarly one, and you want it to have the best chance to be read by other scholars, you will want to look at the pages on the journal's website that list where the title is abstracted and indexed. Typically, the more services that index a given journal, the more likely it is that the articles within will be located and read by various scholarly audiences. Abstracting and indexing information is often prominent on "About the Journal” webpages.

Tip: Keep in mind some specific things you can do as an author toincrease the visibilityof your research, including carefully crafting a title, subtitle, and abstract.

Reputation. If your goals of publishing are related to academic advancement, evaluate the reputation of the journal. Journal titles are sometimes very similar to one another, and deceptive (or "predatory") journals may select titles that are extremely similar to legitimate titles. Among non-predatory publishers, there is still a wide range of scholarly reputations. To help assess reputation, four systems of evaluation are available on this list of titles. Which systems matter for your career depend on the nature of your employer and its geographic location. Ranking journals is controversial; no single system can determine a journal’s ranking in a fair or objective way.

AAA survey: In the summer of 2008, AAA asked approximately 150 anthropology departments to indicate an A, B, or C tier in terms of how their promotions and tenure committees generally perceive a journal. If a title has no ranking ("n/a"), due the survey's length, the journal title was not included in the summer 2008 survey. Many large anthropology departments (where there is a substantial cohort or graduate degree offered in cultural anthropology) value this evaluation.

ERIH: These lists are broken down by subject and the anthropology (from July 2011) and archaeology (from 2007) assessments are noted. These lists are influential in many European departments.

IF: This list includes the 2014 Impact Factors. If a title has no impact factor ("n/a"), the journal has not been accepted by Clarivate Analytics, the company that owns and calculates the Impact Factor. This ranking can be very important to anthropologists employed in four-field anthropology programs, combined departments (such as combined anthropology and sociology programs), or a psychology, education, medicine, or public health department. As a general rule of thumb, the more colleagues in your department who identify as social scientists or whose research is biomedical in orientation, the more likely it is that the Impact Factor is a critical determination of your publications. Many deans also value the prestige associated with publishing in Impact Factor-ranked journals, because it helps them compare scholars from multiple disciplines.

H Index:TheSCImago journal ranking counts citations tracked by Scopus. The values listed are from a search in January 2016. This is a newer system, but called out for specific focus in the upcoming U.K. assessments.